Frustrated by a lack of informed and honest review websites covering a wide range of electronic music, I write them myself.

Monday, November 9, 2015

Purl - Stillpoint

Silent Season: 2015

Purl is Ludvig Cimbrelius, a chap who's released a ridiculous amount of music in the last few years. Just under this name alone, Lord Discogs lists ten albums. Then there's Alveol, providing at least another dozen assorted albums and singles. Throw in a number of one-off aliases like Surr, Xpire, and Ziyal, and you have one busy body. So it goes, though, for the digital market of dub techno and ambient, producers almost necessitated to flood the field with their droning synths and treated field recordings to stay with the pack. Fortunately, Silent Season has a leg up on their competition in cultivating a consistent theme with their releases, music that invokes imagery, moods, and feelings of residing in their base of the Pacific Northwest. As that too is my region of residence, it's made connecting to their output easy as slicing a salmon fillet.

Except, as I write this, I'm not currently in Vancouver, but rather Edmonton. Where the skies are big and blue, with nary a rainforest, mountain, or rocky shoreline in sight. Where it is not mild and damp, but cold and wintery. Where- *glances out window*... Well, I'll be darned. Drizzle. Grey clouds. Reasonable temperatures. I've somehow brought the Pacific Northwest weather to the northern Prairies. Guess I can write this review of Stillpoint while here after all.

And sure enough, the opening track, Havets Sang, begins with the sound of rain on old growth forests, crashing waves against seaweed strewn beaches, and deeply dubbed-out synth drones wrapping you up in early morning blankets of fog. Yeah, sorry, my similes remain stuck in BC coast trappings. How would an appropriate Albertan one go, 'rolling hills full of farms and bison'? Surely not as rain heavy as we get in this track anyway.

Honestly, the music on Stillpoint goes more warm and comforting than what I just described. The follow-up tracks of Baleine and Wilderness maintain the ambient form, but bring in some deep, dub techno groove, then we get... Oh my! Melora, dear God, is this ever a lush piece of ambiance, with gentle angelic vocal treatments, ebbing and flowing as only the best ambient does. I know I've heard this kind of music hundreds of times before, but this one's still as gorgeous as anything I've ever heard. Who cares if it's named after a poor episode of Deep Space Nine [citation needed], Melora's almost worth the price of admission alone.

Many of the remaining tracks maintain the ambient dub techno mold, though some of them start suspiciously sounding like trance – or very brisk ambient techno anyway. Granted, that's part of Purl's MO, creating music that's very hypnotic and meditative. It does get a bit repetitive, but Mr. Cimbrelius use of layered pads, timbre, and distant beats makes for a captivating listen regardless.

Stillpoint is a great collection of dub techno, bringing remarkable warmth to a genre that's more often so cold. Huh, seems remarkably appropriate here, somehow. Ah, I'm just imagining things, probably.